Roadside births

There is something profoundly disquieting about reports of two women that gave birth at the roadside in the vicinity of hospitals they were unable to enter for treatment. Equally disturbing are some of the reactions to these reports. Both the incidents happened in Lahore and were commented on by the wife of Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif. She tweeted that the incidents “…made a powerful political protest — a call to political parties.” She omitted to mention the decline in health service provision relative to the numbers in the population during the tenure of her husband. Adding salt to the wound Shehbaz took to Twitter to say how appalled he was at the callousness demonstrated by the hospital — again failing to acknowledge the part that he and his administration played in that failure. Both husband and wife appear tin-eared and purblind.

Health professionals were caustic in their responses, saying that the sector had never been a priority of the Sharif administration which is more interested in building roads than adding to the health infrastructure. On the same day that one of the women was denied entry to Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, 247 women presented as in labour against a 15-bed capacity. The last teaching hospital was built in 1990. A cursory glance at the provisional census figures suggests that there is a considerable shortfall of teaching hospitals. There are 20+ in the province but they have only 45 per cent of their doctors posts filled. The Punjab government has — astonishingly — not spent its full annual budget of around Rs200b on patient care and doubt is being expressed that up to half of this sum remains unspent.

Once again public services are the casualties of injudicious politicking and plain bad management. There is the money available to increase health services at point of need, but the political will lies in other directions. There can be few needs more pressing than those of a woman in the throes of childbirth. We suggest that the CM and his wife step outside their gilded existences and spend a day in any of the hospitals in Lahore. Perhaps then they may repent their facile tweets.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 24^th, 2017.

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